Pepsi across cultures: analysis and cross-cultural comparison of Pepsi websites

摘要

Nowadays we live in a world where technologies provide great opportunities for crossculturalcommunication. That’s why it’s really important to be aware of cultural differences andits possible influence on the people’s behavior.This study describes and analyzes the influence of culture on web design and marketingstrategies, with special focus on analysis and comparison of Pepsi’s websites as an instrument ofcommunication with the worldwide audience. The main purpose of the study is to try to throwlight on the issues related to cultural adaptation of marketing strategies when doing businessacross cultural borders.Combination of methods, such as literature study, qualitative and quantitative analysis ofwebsites allows seeing correlations between characteristics of cultures and web design indifferent countries.Results show that there are differences in web design among cultures, which can beexplained by cultural traits and characteristics of the society, such aspects as presence of people,their age and genders, marketing campaigns in focus, symmetry in layout, representedinformation, usage of effects and link to historical information.However, it also showed that there are many exceptions which cannot be really explainedfrom cultural perspective. Company’s choice concerning web design can be influenced bycultures but at the same time there are many different issues influencing on decision-making likemarketing strategy and politics.